This introductory chapter begins by considering the debate over the definition and style of neorealism and efforts to determine the historical intellectual origins of Italian neorealism. It then ...
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This introductory chapter begins by considering the debate over the definition and style of neorealism and efforts to determine the historical intellectual origins of Italian neorealism. It then provides an overview of the main themes covered in the subsequent chapters, including how cinema became truly global in the aftermath of World War II; the beginnings of the global context of neorealism in the 1930s; and the connection between Italian cinema, neorealism, and the mythology of the so-called italiani brava gente (Italian nice folk).Less

Introduction : The Geography and History of Global Neorealism

Saverio GiovacchiniRobert Sklar

Published in print: 2011-10-11

This introductory chapter begins by considering the debate over the definition and style of neorealism and efforts to determine the historical intellectual origins of Italian neorealism. It then provides an overview of the main themes covered in the subsequent chapters, including how cinema became truly global in the aftermath of World War II; the beginnings of the global context of neorealism in the 1930s; and the connection between Italian cinema, neorealism, and the mythology of the so-called italiani brava gente (Italian nice folk).

Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. This book challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist ...
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Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. This book challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films—including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves—should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism’s international distribution, this book reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. It traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how—in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom—these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period’s call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid.Less

Brutal Vision : The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema

Karl Schoonover

Published in print: 2012-03-01

Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. This book challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films—including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves—should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism’s international distribution, this book reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. It traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how—in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom—these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period’s call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid.

This chapter outlines how documentary and realist styles coalesced as a form of documentario narrativo in the Italian neorealist movement – the major new paradigm of slum representation which, ...
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This chapter outlines how documentary and realist styles coalesced as a form of documentario narrativo in the Italian neorealist movement – the major new paradigm of slum representation which, according to the author, distinguishes the postwar period. As a hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, neorealism has especially appealed to filmmakers who aimed at telling stories about ordinary, often poverty-stricken people, despite insufficient budgets. The chapter argues that the neorealist mode of production travelled across national and even continental borders in the postwar era, reaching developing film countries and their urban centres in India, Brazil or Mexico, thus becoming one of the very first truly global film or ‘world cinema’ styles. The chapter provides a close reading of Los Olvidados (Buñuel 1950), a fictional story of a boy’s struggle for motherly love in a Mexico City slum. It asks in what way it effectively represents a variety of postwar films that have been, to a larger or lesser extent, influenced by Italian neorealism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of films that have, just like Los Olvidados, employed the narrative perspective of abandoned or homeless street children – a narrative device that is still often employed today (e.g. in Slumdog Millionaire).Less

Neorealist Narratives

Igor Krstić

Published in print: 2016-05-01

This chapter outlines how documentary and realist styles coalesced as a form of documentario narrativo in the Italian neorealist movement – the major new paradigm of slum representation which, according to the author, distinguishes the postwar period. As a hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, neorealism has especially appealed to filmmakers who aimed at telling stories about ordinary, often poverty-stricken people, despite insufficient budgets. The chapter argues that the neorealist mode of production travelled across national and even continental borders in the postwar era, reaching developing film countries and their urban centres in India, Brazil or Mexico, thus becoming one of the very first truly global film or ‘world cinema’ styles. The chapter provides a close reading of Los Olvidados (Buñuel 1950), a fictional story of a boy’s struggle for motherly love in a Mexico City slum. It asks in what way it effectively represents a variety of postwar films that have been, to a larger or lesser extent, influenced by Italian neorealism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of films that have, just like Los Olvidados, employed the narrative perspective of abandoned or homeless street children – a narrative device that is still often employed today (e.g. in Slumdog Millionaire).

This chapter considers the making of Mario Soffici’s Barrio gris (1954). It documents how some Argentine critics were concerned that importing a foreign style could dilute efforts to build a truly ...
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This chapter considers the making of Mario Soffici’s Barrio gris (1954). It documents how some Argentine critics were concerned that importing a foreign style could dilute efforts to build a truly national Argentine cinema. While intrigued by neorealism, Soffici used the film to make a direct statement about Argentine national historical contingencies in the midst of Peronism.Less

“With an Incredible Realism that Beats the Best of the European Cinemas” : The Making of Barrio Gris and the Reception of Italian Neorealism in Argentina, 1947–1955

Paula Halperin

Published in print: 2011-10-11

This chapter considers the making of Mario Soffici’s Barrio gris (1954). It documents how some Argentine critics were concerned that importing a foreign style could dilute efforts to build a truly national Argentine cinema. While intrigued by neorealism, Soffici used the film to make a direct statement about Argentine national historical contingencies in the midst of Peronism.